Has "Missional" Lost Its Meaning?

This week we have a special opportunity to hear from author Mike Frost about his new bookThe Road To Missional: The Journey to the Center of the Church. I've known Michael's work for several years and we've met several times along the way (we did a conference together about seven years ago, if I recall). I'm looking forward to speaking at the tenth anniversary of their ministry in Sydney in a few weeks.

Michael is a provocative thinker and worth reading. I endorsed The Road to Missional because I share Michael's concern about how the word is used and the need for more missional engagement. I think you will find it profitable.

You say we're in danger of over-using the term 'missional' so much that it has lost its original meaning. What makes you say that?

I've been told by several people that books with the word 'missional' in the title no longer sell. I've seen Facebook updates complaining about how 'over' people are with the missional conversation. One conference organizer asked that I not give presentations about the missional church, suggesting I use another phrase to mean the same thing. It seems people have had it with whole missional thing, which breaks my heart, because as I say in The Road to Missional, if the missional conversation is over, it occurs to me that it probably hasn't really ever been had. 

You point out that the missional enterprise transcends church style, but why has it been so associated with a certain style or a particular model of doing church?

Well, it's true that missional church leaders don't just want to "do church differently." They're not advocating any particular model like simple church, house church, megachurch, seeker-sensitive church, and so on. In fact, truly missional leaders don't see changing the church as central to their cause; they want to change the whole world. When you've been swept up into a new awareness of the missio Dei, the unstoppable program of God's unfurling kingdom on earth, you can't even conceive of how to control it, package it, or franchise it.

Having said all of that, though, I do acknowledge that the missional conversation broke out just as Emergent and the alt worship movement took off in the US and the UK. I'm not suggesting there aren't commonalities in those movements, but they do have different starting points and are aiming in different directions. Because of their interest in engaging postmodern generations, the emerging church and alt worship movements did foster pretty cool, urban, Gen X communities. So did some missional church leaders. In fact, when Alan Hirsch and I were writing The Shaping of Things to Come ten years ago, and were looking for stories of missional churches to illustrate our ideas, all we could find were urban churches led by Gen Xers. We knew that the missional agenda transcends age or any particular social demographic, but we were limited by the examples we found.

We're currently working on an updated version of that book and Alan and I can now tell stories of missional communities of just about every shape and size. That's how much things have changed. But back at the turn of the century the missional/emerging/alt church scenes were overlapping and intertwined ad I think this has led casual observers to assume they're all the same thing.

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Ed Stetzer is President of LifeWay Research and LifeWay’s Missiologist in Residence. He has trained pastors and church planters on five continents, holds two masters degrees and two doctorates, and has written dozens of articles and books. Ed is a contributing editor for Christianity Today, a columnist for Outreach Magazine and Catalyst Monthly, serves on the advisory council of Sermon Central and Christianity Today's Building Church Leaders, and is frequently cited or interviewed in news outlets such as USAToday and CNN.

More from Ed Stetzer or visit Ed at www.edstetzer.com/